Impeachment charges issued against Mayorkas
Republicans in House blame him for migrant surge
WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Sunday released two articles of impeachment against Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, charging President Biden’s top immigration official with refusing to uphold the law and breaching the public trust in his handling of a surge of migration at the Mexican border.
Leaders of the House Homeland Security Committee laid out their case against Mayorkas before a Tuesday meeting to approve the charges, paving the way for a quick House vote as soon as early next month to impeach him. It would be the culmination of Republicans’ attacks on Biden’s immigration policies and an extraordinary move given an emerging consensus among legal scholars that Mayorkas’s actions do not constitute high crimes and misdemeanors.
The push comes as House Republicans, egged on by former president Trump, dig in against a bipartisan border compromise Mayorkas helped to negotiate with a group of senators, which Biden has vowed to sign. House GOP lawmakers have dismissed the agreement as too weak and argued that they cannot trust Biden to crack down on migration now when he has failed to in the past.
The charges against Mayorkas, should they be approved by the full House, are all but certain to fizzle in the Democraticled Senate, where Mayorkas would stand trial and a twothirds majority would be needed to convict and remove him. But the process would yield a remarkable election-year political spectacle, effectively putting Biden’s immigration record on trial as Trump, who has made a border crackdown his signature issue, seeks to clinch the Republican presidential nomination to run against him.
The first impeachment article essentially brands the Biden administration’s border policies an official crime. It accuses Mayorkas of willfully and systematically flouting laws requiring migrants to be detained by carrying out “catch and release” policies that allow some to stay in the United States pending court proceedings and others fleeing certain war-torn and economically ravaged countries to live and work in the country temporarily. Immigration laws grant the president broad leeway to do both.
The second article charges Mayorkas with lying to Congress about whether the border was secure and obstructing efforts to investigate him.
“These articles lay out a clear, compelling, and irrefutable case for Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ impeachment,” Representative Mark Green, a Tennessee Republican and chair of the House Homeland Security panel, said in a statement. “Congress has a duty to see that the executive branch implements and enforces the laws we have passed.”
The Biden administration and Democrats have defended Mayorkas as having acted legally and truthfully, arguing that he complied with the GOP’s investigations fully even before they opened an impeachment inquiry. They have also slammed the impeachment as a political exercise, accusing Republicans of scapegoating Mayorkas as a favor to the hard right instead of working with them on bipartisan solutions to mitigate what leaders in both parties consider a border crisis.
Republicans “are abusing Congress’ impeachment power to appease their MAGA members, score political points and deflect Americans’ attention from their do-nothing Congress,” Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the senior Democrat on the panel, said, adding, “The House must reject this sham resolution.”